Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China. E. N. Anderson
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was twenty-four square kilometers in extent, making it forty-five times as large as any other settlement remotely close, so we are clearly dealing with a real capital of a real state (Li Feng 2008: 25). About 500 place names appear in the oracle bones. This happens to be about the number of place names known to the average person, worldwide; there seems to be something about the human brain that makes 500 places perhaps the highest easily learned number (Hunn 1990).
Excavation of Zhengzhou is handicapped by the fact that it is still a flourishing metropolis. Many cultural traits have lasted the entire 3,500 years since it was a capital. These begin with the intensive agriculture and pig raising but also include some startling details. When I visited Zhengzhou in 1978, I became fascinated with the ash-glazed high-fired brownware in the town market. Notable was a pottery kettle with three short, stubby legs, which was sold by the hundred. There were also cups and bowls. In the city’s excellent Shang Dynasty museum, I found the same kettles, cups, and bowls—not merely similar, but almost identical. The oldest of these are the earliest known ash-glazed high-fired pottery in the world. The technique is simple; I have seen it done at traditional kilns. The potter, or his assistant, simply mixes ash, water, and some of the pottery clay. Then the potter gives the pot (already made and dried, but not fired) a quick whirl in this mix and then fires it. The ash fluxes the feldspar in the clay into a good glaze. The style and technique produced pots so cheap and serviceable that no one could improve on them over the centuries. Today’s “sand pots” (made of sand-tempered clay) carry on the tradition and are essential for making good Chinese stews, because they distribute the heat smoothly and evenly, “sweat” a bit in cooking, and do not create the ruinous hot-spots and cold-spots of aluminum ware.
The Shang world depended on agriculture, which was already quite intensive and involved millets, wheat, barley, rice, vegetables, fruits, and domestic animals. Far from being a largely ceremonial or political site, the capital city was a major manufacturing and commercial hub; at least this was true of the final capital, Anyang (R. Campbell et al. 2011). Vast workshops made artifacts from bone (from cattle, deer, pig, and so on); these were evidently traded widely. Impressive bronze foundries produced thousands of tons of beautiful bronze work, including huge vessels. One wonders how people in such an early civilization could work with several tons of molten metal at a time. The industrial accident rate must have been horrific, and deforestation must have been extensive to produce the needed fuels. Very possibly, tracts of forest were reserved and selectively cut, as was done for later metalworking activities (Wagner 2008).
The Shang bureaucracy was complicated and lavish enough to include Many Dogs Officers, who took care of the hunting hounds. There were also Many Horses Officers (Keightley 1999: 280; 2000: 111–12). These officials are frequently mentioned in oracle bone inscriptions. There were cooks, supposedly including the legendary Yi Yin, cook to King Tang. (The latter, at least, was apparently real.) Yi Yin came as part of the entourage of the bride in a royal marriage and appeared carrying a bronze ding, a big three-legged meat-cooking dish (So 1992: 11). Thousands of dings survive (maybe one of them is Yi Yin’s), and residue analysis confirms that they were for cooking meat. Yi’s teachings on cooking appear in the records of Lü Buwei in the third century CE; alas for ancient lore, it is fairly clear from the third-century writing style that they are apocryphal (see the discussion of Warring States foodways below in “Later Zhou and the Warring States”). The ordinary people, meanwhile, ate mallows and onions—for which, Wang Chong reminds us, no gourmet cook is needed (1907: 69). (Mallows, the Malva parviflora complex, are humble herbs that were an extremely common food among the poor and ordinary folk in old China; they became a symbol of poverty and thus were shunned by later generations [E. Anderson 1988]. They are, however, quite good and are also among the most nutritious foods known to science. Wang refers to the fruits, a children’s snack still popular in my youth in California, where they were known as “cheeses”—they look and taste like tiny green cheeses.)
Weather and pests were an endless problem. Wind was a constant and major concern; David Keightley, who did archaeological work in the area, says from experience that the Shang kings did not exaggerate: the wind is ferocious. Situated in a fertile and lush but climatically challenged part of China, Shang could lurch from lavish abundance to desperate want and back to prosperity in quite short time ranges.
Time was critical: seasons and dates had to be coordinated for planting. The Chinese obsession with almanacs and calendars had begun, driven by the need to manage planting and harvest. I should correct here the common scholars’ belief that the rulers had to prepare calendars for the stupid peasants. Evidently these scholars have never farmed. Farmers know perfectly well when to plant and harvest and have many ways of determining this. The calendars were, instead, for timing elite rituals. However, the farmers later got some imagined benefits: the calendars included predictions about the coming year’s weather. Dawn and dusk were important, but night was a scary time to stay indoors; lamps do not exist in the archaeological record (Keightley 2000: 25), and burning straw or wood for light could go only so far.
Shang had quite powerful rulers, who had extensive authority. They constructed vast earthworks: walls, altars, building complexes. They were buried in enormous tombs, along with vast numbers of human and animal sacrifices. (Ian Morris, 2010: 213, has rather morbidly estimated that “a quarter of a million people” were sacrificed during the dynasty’s long run. However, this number seems a bit high.) Kings became deified ancestors, requiring a hundred or so individuals to accompany them into the other world. Even larger sacrifices of both humans and horses were sometimes made. One king went out with 79 humans, 28 horses, a deer, and, most oddly, three monkeys (Lu Liancheng and Yan 2002: 161). One wonders why the simians. Guard dogs were also sacrificed in some cases, presumably to guard the dead in the afterlife.
As elsewhere, however (Bellah 2011: 213), human sacrifice ended after a few centuries. During Zhou, some human sacrificing continued, and animal sacrifices including dogs were frequent (Falkenhausen 2006: 181–82), but sacrifice rapidly diminished and finally died out. I think the old Marxian explanation is the best: kings simply could not afford the loss of labor power, whether human or animal.
Human sacrifice declined early enough that Confucius was unaware of it (though burials show it was still being done locally in his time). He was horrified that people sacrificed straw figures of people and animals, since it seemed too much like the real thing; he did not know that the real thing had indeed been the rule and was not altogether extinct in remote states even in his own time. Straw itself then gave way to pottery by Qin and Han times. This delights archaeologists, since we have wonderful pottery models—accurate and often artistically beautiful—of virtually everything a dead person could wish. Alas for archaeology, pottery gave way a few centuries later to paper models, which are still the rule in Chinese memorial rites. They are burned ritually, thus “sent to the sky,” where they become the real thing in the world of the deceased.
In Shang, the king could order farmers to work collectively in the fields. Officers supervised (Keightley 1999: 279). In one storage pit, “444 stone sickles showing wear were discovered with gold leaves, stone sculpture, bronze ritual vessels, and jade artifacts. Such precious items would be found neither in the storage pit of an ordinary farmer nor in a stone workshop. The implements must have been stored there by a master” (C.-y. Hsu and Linduff 1988: 28). He was evidently a noble—either an administrator or an owner of an estate. The Shang used stone implements to conduct slash-and-burn agriculture in forests, as well as upland agriculture on grass and brush steppes. (Bronze is impractical for farming, though it was used for lack of anything better; it is expensive and brittle and does not hold an edge well.) The bottomlands especially were valued as fertile farmland. Ash, vegetable debris, and presumably dung restored soil fertility (C.-y. Hsu and Linduff 1988: 29).
Worship was directed especially at the high god Di (“heavenly king” or “thearch”) or Shang Di. (This shang means “above” and has nothing to do with the dynastic name, which means “merchant.” Legends related that it got this meaning because the Shang elite became merchants when the dynasty fell. There is no proof of this, but it is an intriguing idea.) The high god was known in Zhou as Tian, “Heaven.”
Dead kings—along with earlier, otherwise forgotten ancestors—routinely caused trouble when their wants and needs were not